6 Things Star Trek Should Do To Make Me Watch It Again

To boldly go back to where we once were.

I've watched the new Star Trek trailer off and on over the last several months, well, at least since they released it, and I just saw it again. I can honestly admit to myself that I'm sad where Star Trek is going anymore.

Like many people I was genuinely excited when I heard about the so called reboot of the series. I was anxious to see Star Trek set back in the era of The Original Series (TOS). Of course the first movie came out and I enjoyed it on a superficial level but it was, for a lack of a better analogy, like eating too much candy. Sure, it's good and tasty but after a while your body wants something a bit healthier. And, in this case, healthy meant something more cerebral.

The Simpler Days of Star Wars

When we didn't know much about Star Wars

Long time ago in the late 70s after the Star Wars phenomenon had hit us I was able to get the following poster through a Burger Kings/Coca Cola promotion and I remember spending many hours just looking at it and taking in the details.

This was in the time between Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back came out and there was not a lot of information on the Universe of Star Wars. This was a time when Darth Vader was a bad guy straight and simple who had killed Luke's dad. Darth Vader was simply his name and not a Title.
Those days were interesting and especially so for my 9 to 10 year old self.

I often think about and sometimes talk about paradigm shifts or Copernicus moments. When one day something is a certain way and has been for as long as people can remember and within a moment the world changes in a very real and perceptible way. Suddenly things are different. Sometimes they happen overnight but usually it’s within a year to a year and a half. In my lifetime I've gone through three of them that I can think of.

Back in 1984...

With all the stuff going on over the new Ghostbusters reboot/remake I got to thinking back...

In June of 1984 Ghostbusters was released upon the United States. I was 16 and had joined Police Explorers a bit after that as a result of a classmate who was also in Police Explorers and had asked me to join.

Of course Ghostbusters was a hit and a phenomenon so, when October rolled around a local haunted house needed someone to direct traffic at their super popular (and Ghostbuster themed) haunted house. I didn't have a uniform yet so they gave me a pair of white gloves and I had to hangout with a uniformed Explorer. Our Explorer group did this to raise money for our organization.

The haunted house played the Ghostbusters theme over and over. It was on non-stop repeat and, for a while, I grew to hate that song. It took a long while before I could listen to it again.

As the night went on and the Ghostbuster's theme played for it's umpteenth time I'd gotten into the groove of directing traffic. Probably was subconsciously grooving to the song too as some sort of Pavlovian response to the music. A car pulls up and rolls down a window. A guy who looked like he had just rolled off the set of Breakin 2: Electric Boogaloo looked at me, white gloves and all, and asked me if I was some sort of white Micheal Jackson. I thought about it for a moment and replied, "yes, I think I am," which was unusual for a shy guy like me. The guys in the car, the other Explorer and I had a good laugh about it and then he continued on his way.

It's a funny story and I often think fondly back at it because now it reminds me of some sort of scene in an Adam Sandler 80s themed movie.

Those days were awesome!

It's been awhile

Actually it's been a freaking long time!!!!

My last post was in February of 2013? Sheesh!

So, I've rediscovered the blog and I hope to contribute something useful to the blog-o-sphere.

I didn't finish the dungeon diver C64 game but I've played and uploaded a bunch of Minecraft. If you want to check that out then you are more than welcome to.

Anyway, I'm off to blow off the dust this place seems to accumulated. We'll see if I can do better this time.

Making A Text Dungeon Crawler On the Commodore 64: Part 5 Catching Up

So, I took a couple days off from my Commodore 64 BASIC dungeon crawl to take breather from the project, a little breather, and to work out how I was going to handle the movement and other factors that are needed to make a dungeon crawl.

In my attempt to "save memory" I decided to use a one dimensional array to store my room data and, even worse, I stored strings instead of integers in my array. Something like:

10 DIM RM$(100)

Making A Text Dungeon Crawler On the Commodore 64: Part 4 A Brief Interlude

Welcome to video four in the series. This is getting to be an enjoyable series for me!

As I get deeper into this project I wanted to take a few moments and fix a variable that I may have problems with in the future. This project is reminding me of the many pitfalls I had on my BASIC game projects when I was in high school. The most noticable to me is the fact that I didn't plan out the projects that well. So, as a result, I'd either work my self into a corner and have to start the project over and better planned or I'd have to implement a feature poorly because I didn't think it out well enough. There were also times I'd get so fed up with a project I'd abandon it. I find that is the case here.

Making A Text Dungeon Crawler On the Commodore 64: Part 3 Character Creation And Bug Hunts

Ah, the third video in a series of videos where I uses the Commodore 64 to create a simple text dungeon crawl. Of course I'm using C64 BASIC.  This video is a bit long and I think it clocks in at over 30 minutes but that was not on purpose.

When I'm doing these videos I'm programming something off the top of my head. This is not the proper way to do things as you would usually do a lot of planning. This was, however, how I used to do projects, well most projects, back when I was in high school. It was any wonder I got any of them completed.